posted at 10:41 pm on May 20, 2014 by Allahpundit

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on Tuesday there has been talk about scheduling a separate floor vote on the ENLIST Act after Republican leadership blocked the bill from coming to the floor as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act — a defense policy bill.

The bill , introduced by Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), would allow undocumented immigrants who entered the country before they were 15 years old to join the military. After their service, these immigrants would be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship if they were honorably discharged…

When asked if Republicans planned to allow a standalone vote on the ENLIST Act on the House floor, Boehner said, “There have been discussions about that.”

***

With border authorities in South Texas overwhelmed by a surge of young illegal migrants traveling by themselves, the Department of Homeland Security declared a crisis this week and moved to set up an emergency shelter for the youths at an Air Force base in San Antonio, officials said Friday.

After seeing children packed in a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Tex., during a visit last Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Monday declared “a level-four condition of readiness” in the Rio Grande Valley. The alert was an official recognition that federal agencies overseeing borders, immigration enforcement and child welfare had been outstripped by a sudden increase in unaccompanied minors in recent weeks…

The children are coming primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, making the perilous journey north through Mexico to Texas without parents or close adult relatives. Last weekend alone, more than 1,000 unaccompanied youths were being held at overflowing border stations in South Texas, officials said.

The flow of child migrants has been building since 2011, when 4,059 unaccompanied youths were apprehended by border agents. Last year more than 21,000 minors were caught, and Border Patrol officials had said they were expecting more than 60,000 this year. But that projection has already been exceeded.

Jessica L. Wright, the department’s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, described the immigrants, known as DREAMers, as “some of the best and brightest in America that we could capitalize on.”

Wright said the decision would come by summer’s end and involved the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the White House.

***

The federal government granted temporary work permits to roughly 10 million foreign workers from 2000 to 2013, effectively boosting the supply of new workers by roughly 20 percent per year.

Only 650,000 of the guest workers were hired for agricultural jobs, according to the Tuesday report by the Congressional Research Service. That’s only seven percent of the inflow.

But roughly 3.1 million university-trained foreigners got permits to work in the professional sector for up to 10 years, said the report, titled “Selected Statistics on Immigrant and non-Immigrant Admissions since 2000.”…

“There are a lot of things he could do to demonstrate that we can have more confidence in his administration to implement an immigration reform bill the way we pass it,” Boehner said, but did not list specific ways.

***

“Nobody trusts the president, and that’s just the reality,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla.), a Republican who has written a bill that beefs up border security and offers a path to legal status for illegal immigrants. “Can the president re-establish his credibility in the next two months with the House, with the American people or with our allies? No. I think he can hopefully not make it worse.”

Boehner has not said how Obama could restore trust among Republicans who have watched angrily as he has repeatedly delayed parts of the healthcare law without congressional approval. Aides say, however, that he could begin by working with GOP members on some of their other priorities, such as the Skills Act, which the House passed to overhaul federal job-training programs.

A House GOP leadership aide said Obama could also help his cause by publicly ruling out unilateral action to halt deportations and by promising to enforce any new immigration law fully in the way Congress intended.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, offering his first public hints at the outcome of the review he’s conducting at Obama’s behest, said Thursday that the so-called Secure Communities program needs a “fresh start.” He suggested it might be revamped to focus on people who actually have been convicted of crimes, not just those arrested or booked…

The program allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to run fingerprints of anyone booked for a local or state crime through a federal database for immigration violations. If there’s a match, ICE can ask local police and sheriffs to detain the person, and then decide whether to deport them.

Testifying before a Senate Subcommittee hearing in Chicago on “Immigrant Enlistment” that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) chaired, Gutierrez said that “every institution in America, including our military, must work around the inability of our federal government and the U.S. House of Representatives to fix our immigration system.”

He also pushed the Navy and Marines to allow U.S. citizens who are married to illegal immigrants to enlist at a hearing in which Durbin called on the Pentagon to start enlisting DREAMers.

***

In a recent commentary, National Institute for Latino Policy President Angelo Falcón wrote, “Although immigration reform affects about 15 percent of the total Latino population, as a public policy issue it now occupies almost all the Latino policy agenda, sucking up, as one colleague recently put it, all the oxygen on Latino issues.”

Falcón questions whether the continued debate about the status of the undocumented population is a distraction from the needs of the much larger pool of Hispanics who are citizens. The Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project estimates that there are 11.7 undocumented migrants in the U.S. By comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the overall U.S. Hispanic population is 53 million…

Still, Beltrán sees one significant by-product of the drawn-out immigration debate. “We now have a younger generation who has become politicized. They are savvy, skeptical, and optimistic all at the same time. I think this will have long-term consequences, because they have a sense of their own power.”

This “immigration generation” will someday turn their energy and focus to other issues, argues Beltrán. “These young people are participating in civil disobedience and so much activism in their 20s,” she said. “Imagine what they are going to be doing in their 40s – with law degrees!”

Okay JD, last test. To prove you’re not a Moby Troll, you have to take the QOTD Oath.

Repeat after me.

I, Judd Dreg, *spits* do solemnly swear, to uphold the honor of all QOTD ladies, to agitate all trolls who enter these premises unmercifully, to pray for the safe return of all our beloved banned brothers and sisters and obey the rule of no QOTD Rules …

Daughter had golf and some baseball-sized hail a little while ago (Western Suburbs – Chicago). She thought the windows were going to break. Scary stuff. We only had dime-sized ones. Not as impressive or damaging.

Fallon on May 20, 2014 at 11:09 PM

When nature starts dropping baseball sized hail on you, it’s telling you, it’s time for you to move…

Here ya go Fallon. On one of the older cameras, infra red, not great quality.

Bmore on May 20, 2014 at 11:08 PM

Oh, how cute. You are having quite the spring, Bmore. I still haven’t seen even a duckling, yet. I used to have a muskrat but it was eaten by the mink, which got hit by a car. Nothing in the pond but ducks now.

I, Judd Dreg, *spits* do solemnly swear, to uphold the honor of all QOTD ladies, to agitate all trolls who enter these premises unmercifully, to pray for the safe return of all our beloved banned brothers and sisters and obey the rule of no QOTD Rules …

Things are finally getting back to normal at our home. After some sheetrock & repaint of the living room,Kitchen, and Pantry you’d never know what hapenned. Of course LibFree will have to attend court mandated counseling and anger management classes until the fall. This all could have been avoided if MSNBC would let us know in advance if they were going to play reruns of Dateline instead of Rachel Maddow. Jr is not good with change. I’m just glad the cat’s eating again.

Obama is the true savior of this country! Had McCain been elected, we would have had Amnesty by now. Had Romney been elected, given his Adelson-inspired conversion, we would have had Amnesty as well. It’s only Obama’s outrageous behavior that’s preventing Boehner from passing it.

On this new fraud aka “amnesty”, this very hour and for days now under age, 9 to 16 year old Mexican and other country kids have been flooding into Texas. It was planned by Obama and his wrecking crew. Now thousands are being housed via Pres. order for their saftey at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Thousands more will come all of them alone without parents, by the plan it is going on now.
Same will happen in New Mexico, Az, Nevada and Calif.

The two party evil money cult does nothing, no one is allowed to secure the borders, the Border Patrol has been ordered to stand down.

It does not matter if the weak RINO’s roll over in public, they have already whored out total prior.

What are these other Latino issues that guy was talking about? They are evidently very important and are getting sidetracked by immigration. Are these issues of any relevance to anyone but Latinos? And why are the specific Latino issues?

I used to board my dogs at a place farther out in the country. It was a few miles from a mink farm. The owner said the scariest thing ever was to open up the dog food cupboard and find a mink in there. All teeth and growls. Apparently, they escape fairly often.

Day 5/5 coming–my Friday, as we say in the hospital…i am glad….
We have had an extraordinary number of crazy people this rotation…
And when I say crazy, I don’t mean crazy as in funny, I mean psychotic. The real deal….
Counted it up today–20% of my patients were either sent to or getting ready to be sent to the inpatient psych floor..

If we have a defacto amnesty, why does immigration reform have to include citizenship? It seems redundant.

El_Terrible on May 20, 2014 at 11:14 PM

It’s like when Time rag made such a big deal about changing its idiotic award from “Man of the Year” to “Person of the Year” … and then went on to award it to groups and things that aren’t even persons. The label, evidently, had nothing to do with anything but they just had to change it and show how lefty-cool they are!!

We’re totally infested with idiots. The errors of the trial and error of evolution are piling up, big-time.

The converse of this axiom follows from the substitution property of equality. If the background logic does not include equality “=”, x=y may be defined as an abbreviation for the following formula (Hatcher 1982, p. 138, def. 1):